Principal Engineer, Payments

About Grab and Our Workplace

Grab is Southeast Asia's leading superapp. From getting your favourite meals delivered to helping you manage your finances and getting around town hassle-free, we've got your back with everything. In Grab, purpose gives us joy and habits build excellence, while harnessing the power of Technology and AI to deliver the mission of driving Southeast Asia forward by economically empowering everyone, with heart, hunger, honour, and humility.

Get to Know the Team

At Grab Financial Group (GFin), we're building the future of payments in Southeast Asia. As Head of Payments Engineering, you will lead the end-to-end engineering organization powering all payment experiences across the Grab ecosystem – from in-app wallet transactions and online checkouts, to in-store POS payments and acquiring services for merchants. This is a director-level role with a remit that spans both strategic direction and deep technical leadership.

Get to Know the Role

As a Principal Engineer for Payments at Grab, you will be the technical driver behind the architecture and delivery of regional-scale payments platforms that power our consumer, driver, merchant, and enterprise ecosystems across Southeast Asia. You will design and ship fault-tolerant, compliant, and cost-efficient services that process high volumes of transactions across multiple countries, currencies, payment methods, and regulatory regimes.

You will partner closely with Product, Risk, Compliance, Finance, Operations, and country teams to build platform capabilities spanning authorization, capture, settlement, reconciliation, disbursements/payouts, refunds and disputes, as well as wallets and real-time bank transfers. You will set the technical vision, lead complex multi-quarter initiatives, and raise engineering quality across the organization through design leadership, hands-on implementation, and mentorship.

You will report to the Head of Engineering. This position will be onsite at Grab One-North office.

The Critical Tasks You Will Perform

• Own design and delivery of mission-critical payment systems with high availability, low latency, and strict correctness.
• Define core payments architecture and drive platformization with clear domains, stable APIs, event contracts, data models, and versioning.
• Build resilient integrations to card networks, banks, APMs, and real-time rails that tolerate changes and outages.
• Champion reliability, observability, security, compliance, scalability, operability, and cost with SRE and Security, and lead chaos tests, DR, and incidents.
• Lead regionalization across currency, localization, regulation, and scheme needs with safe rollouts and migrations.
• Make pragmatic, data-driven decisions that balance impact, speed, and maintainability, and align stakeholders on trade-offs.
• Author and review design docs/RFCs, lead architecture reviews, set coding/testing standards, and elevate service.
• Lead by example with prototypes and critical-path builds, mentor senior and staff engineers, and scale best practices and culture.

What Essential Skills You Will Need

• Bachelor's in Computer Science or related is required; a Master's is preferred.
• 10+ years in software, including 5+ in senior/lead roles delivering complex systems.
• Advanced in Java, Go, or Python, with strong coding and testing discipline.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems and microservices: decomposition, reliability, scale.
• Extensive hands-on work in payments (auth/capture, settlement, recon, ledger, payouts, refunds/disputes, orchestration) with correctness and idempotency.
• Strong SQL/NoSQL skills with solid financial data modeling, consistency, and reconciliation.
• Proven integrations with card networks, banks, APMs, and real-time rails using patterns.
• Solid grounding in security and compliance: PCI DSS, encryption/KMS, privacy, and KYC/AML.
• Significant AWS/Azure/GCP experience, including multi-region, multi-tenant, and cost efficiency.
• Familiarity with DevOps/SRE practices and tools: CI/CD, IaC, observability, incident response, and SLOs.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and cross-team leadership to drive multi-quarter delivery.

Life at Grab

We care about your well-being at Grab, here are some of the global benefits we offer:

• We have your back with Term Life Insurance and comprehensive Medical Insurance.
• With GrabFlex, create a benefits package that suits your needs and aspirations.
• Celebrate moments that matter in life with loved ones through Parental and Birthday leave, and give back to your communities through Love-all-Serve-all (LASA) volunteering leave
• We have a confidential Grabber Assistance Programme to guide and uplift you and your loved ones through life's challenges.
• Balancing personal commitments and life's demands are made easier with our FlexWork arrangements such as differentiated hours

What We Stand For at Grab

We are committed to building an inclusive and equitable workplace that enables diverse Grabbers to grow and perform at their best. As an equal opportunity employer, we consider all candidates fairly and equally regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, family commitments, physical and mental impairments or disabilities, and other attributes that make them unique.